`He's got the whole highway'

The Ohio highway shooting story has generated less attention than the D.C. sniper attacks. But in some ways, it's even more menacing.

February 16, 2004|By Julia Keller, Tribune cultural critic.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The highway is a half-dozen different shades of gray. Gray sky, gray-blue horizon, a tangle of dark gray trees flanking either side of the gray road.

Every American highway seems to revert to some aboriginal state of grayness. You know these roads. Drive one and you've driven them all.

These days, though, the highways around Ohio's capital city are like no others. The southern stretch of Interstate Highway 270, which encircles Columbus, has been plagued since May by a series of mysterious shootings.

Lately, the sniper seems to have expanded his hunting grounds, first going south down Interstate 71, which splits off I-270 heading to Cincinnati, and even more recently, going east. On Saturday morning, a Chevy Suburban was struck by a bullet along Interstate 70, about fifteen miles east of Columbus.

The driver was unscathed, but the shootings are beginning to hit home: The highway -- symbol of freedom and accessibility, the heart of the American dream of heading out when the mood strikes you -- is, in these parts at least, suddenly a place of menace and peril.

Twenty-four shootings have been linked thus far to the highway sniper. Bullets have been dug out of cars and trucks and school buses, pried out of houses and a school. Some drivers didn't even know their vehicles had been hit until they got where they were going and saw the chilling evidence.

The only fatality was Gail Knisley, 62, of Washington Court House, Ohio, who had hitched a ride with a friend to a doctor's appointment on Nov. 25 when a bullet tore into the car and killed her.

The shootings, which authorities only in the late fall began to believe were connected, have left a great many people here thoroughly and unashamedly spooked. It is, indisputably, the chief topic of conversation among everybody who drives or has driven, or everybody who knows anybody who drives or has driven, these highways. For random violence induces the most terrifying of all realizations: The culprit could be anybody.

"Maybe," says Dave McKinney, gesturing with an Arby's sack from which twines the heavy smells of his lunch, "it's a gang. And to join the gang, it's like, `Here's your test. Go do it.'"

McKinney and his partner, Lester Jackson Jr., drive a truck for a refuse collection company based in Powell, Ohio, from the north to the south side of Columbus. Their truck is painted beige, with the company's logo in cheerful purple. Because of their jobs, they have no choice but to frequent the very territory in which an unknown killer has trolled for targets.

Jackson adds, "It's scary. It's strange to wake up in the morning and think, `He's out there.' And he's got the whole highway."

Once they start talking about the sniper, McKinney and Jackson do what a lot of people do. They speculate about what kind of kinks in the psyche could produce such behavior.

"He's upset with the world," says Jackson, whose blue knit cap rides low against the cold. "And yeah, the world is corrupt. The government's not fair. But you're not going to solve it by shooting."

"Bad childhood," murmurs McKinney. "Something real sick."

The shootings remind a lot of people of 2002's sniper attacks in the suburbs around Washington, D.C., which left 10 people dead before two men were arrested and charged with the killings.

The Ohio sniper case has garnered what appears to be less publicity, perhaps because only one person has died.

But in some ways, it's even more terrifying than the Washington, D.C., case, because the sniper's focus is a highway. All of the cars and trucks at which he has taken aim apparently were traveling, joining the endless gray wash of vehicles that blurs its way across central Ohio, across America.

Highways are symbols of our restless, peripatetic souls, of constant journeys that tunnel deep into tomorrow. Highways are about change and second chances. About starting over or just starting, period.

To think that a highway -- the road home and the road away from home -- has come under siege is creepy and insidious.

All senseless acts of evil are unsettling, but this is something else again. It seems to evoke a sense that something precious has been snatched from us -- our easy nonchalance about road trips, maybe. The perpetual right to disappear into that aimless gray dash of highway.

It also incites, in even mild-mannered people, a passionate desire for vengeance.

"If I catch him or see him," says Karen Fisher, "I'm going to run him down. I won't hit the brakes."